[RELEASED] - Screen Space Area Lights (SSAL)

Thank you for creating a fantastic product and being so responsive to your customers. I will be purchasing your product tonight. Keep up the great service and pursuit of excellence.

 

Thank you for the through answer and examples. 2 more questions. Do they support lightmapping? And would the performance be increase by occlusion culling since it's dependent on geometry. Thanks again.

 

Thanks for the kind comments! We appreciate it!

 

Our lights support lightmapped materials, however, they can not be baked into lightmaps, since our stuff gets applied as a fullscreen effect and I'm not aware of any way to integrate such things into beast. So if you want baked arealights you should prefer the area lights that ship with beast/unity.

To be honest, I'm not sure, how our package would react to occlusion culling. I'll do some tests next week and keep you posted.

Have a nice weekend!

 

Version 1.51 has been approved and is available for download.

 

Is it possible to have the area lights work with custom lighting models in my shaders? I'd like to use area lights with Disney's principled lighting model instead of a standard blinnphong.

 

I'm afraid right now we don't support custom lighting models.

It is on our todo list, though, since a couple of users already asked for this feature. We are currently thinking about how to integrate this into our package elegantly. We might implement something like custom lighting functions in surface shaders, that let you define own lighting models.

But this is still in the planning phase.

 

Loving the product so far, it's amazing how easily you can begin to fake GI with just two RT area lights.

I wanted to ask about shadow support a bit further. Not to pressure you in any way, simply to better make decisions internally around our project.

Specifically what is the likelihood/feasibility of shadow support coming at all?

And, if it is coming when would the earliest be that we would see it?

Answering these two questions will help up us better know how to spend our time lighting some upcoming complex scenes with minimal rework down the road.

Thanks again.

 

Hi,

yes, shadow support will be coming for sure. Currently it seems, that ISMs (Imperfect Shadow Maps) might be a good candidate for area light soft shadows and we are doing tests and implementing prototypes to evaluate this approach.

But the algorithm is a bit involved and contains still a lot of moving targets, which keep us from telling you a reliable release date. Sorry, I just wan't to avoid building up false hopes.

Regarding your upcoming project, I would not recommend waiting for shadow support. Even if ISMs turn out to be the right technique, it will still take a while util we have integrated it into our package properly.

Martin

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/14151, for ies light, see here.

 

Hi guys,

your area lights look great and I´m considering a purchase. I´ve just got a couple of questions :

Does it work together with
- Alloy Physical Shader Framework --> https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/11978
- Skyshop Image Based Lighting Marmoset --> https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/8880

Best regards,
Michael

 

Mpankin, your asset is wonderful ! I encourage everyone who wants great lightining to get this, i am having just a small problem, when i set my scene to linear space, i get weird things happens to transparent cut objects:



Thank you


oh, when I disable "Areal Light Renderer" the problem stops, so i realized that is readlight problem

Many thanks

 

@angelodelvecchio: Check your inbox.

@FogGobbler: It should work with Skyshop. I just did a quick test and it seemed to work properly.



However, I'm by no means an expert in Skyshop. So I can't tell for sure what will happen, when you use more advanced Skyshop features. What exactly would you be interested in?

I contacted the developer of the Alloy package and keep you posted.

 

Thanks a lot, MPanknin! It would be really awesome if your asset works together with the alloy physical framework.
Something else: does your IES implantation create a cubemap and plugs it into a point light? Should also work with marmoset, right?
Thanks for your time and effort,
Michael

 

@ Mpanknin, just asking about Marmosrt and your asset in General. Just Starter with marmoset myself, so I dont know about the advanced features.
Best regards,
Michael

 

Hi MPanknin,

very good asset.

But I have a request.

There is any chance to see SSAL on OpenGL / ES and mobile devices?
I need to use it on a mobile project ...

Thanks

 

@kaz2057. There is no mobile support at the moment. The lighting algorithm is just to expensive for mobile devices. I know, that is not the answer you want to hear, sorry.

We might start implementing support for mobile when stuff like this becomes mainstream...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkJ5PupShfk

Cheers,
Martin

 

Thanks for the info.

But because of I need to use just 1 (one) area light for my application, maybe in may case there is no problem about performance.

The major problem was your SSAL shader was written in DX11? Right?

 

We don't utilize any dx11 specific stuff in our code. It's really just a matter of performance.

 

Is shadow support coming soon?

 

Hi,

Just a quick question does this realtime area light supports Amplify Texture?

 

I am doing some cursory looks at SSAL and was wondering if it works with Alloy? If I can combined the two I will use SSAL in our next project for sure.

 

I went ahead and got SSAL, and imported it into a project with Alloy, it seems to work however there is no specular reflection on any alloy materials. I would really like some help with making this work please.

 

@Setmaster: We are still working on it, but it won't be finished soon.

@MegsTan: A while ago we did a quick test with Amplify and our lights. It seemed to work properly.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/175467-RELEASED-Screen-Space-Area-Lights-(SSAL)/page9

But like I wrote, we are no expert when it comes to Amplify as we have never used it ourself. So I can't really comment on advanced Amplify features, I'm afraid.

@SeanPollman: Right now the two packages aren't compatible completely. The missing specular is due to the fact, that the Alloy package makes heavy use of custom PBS lighting models, which aren't supported by our lights. That is why you can only see the diffuse part generated by our lights. We are in contact with the developers of the Alloy package and are currently investigating, how the two packages can be integrated properly.

 

MPanknin

I purchased the SSAL kit for use with a setup similar to Oculus. However, in my implementation, I receive a lot of strange behavior. When I apply the effects to the Oculus package, as outlined in the instructions, I receive the same behavior. See the attached image. It seems as if the intended effect of the light is flipped upside down. I remember reading something about how it was a glitch with a simple workaround, but neither pressing play nor building fixes it.

Thanks

 

Hi JamieVRcade,

that looks strange indeed. When you say you have a setup similar to the Rift, what exactly does that mean? What rendering path are you using, how have you setup your viewport settings etc. ?

In the past there was a bug, that occured when the rendering path was set to UsePlayerSettings instead of Forward or Deferred, but I thought, we had fixed it.

It would be most helpful, if you could upload an example project, otherwise it's really difficult for us to understand what's going wrong there.

Thanks,
Martin

 

Yeah my game preview window has upside down overlay unless I set the Oculus cameras to 'deferred'.

Also, I have a separate regular camera that I used for non-Oculus builds. My realtime area lights look fantastic on the Oculus camera, but with the regular camera, I get weird shimmering on walls etc. The regular camera has the redlights regular rendering script attached, and I just disable the Oculus camera object when I want to use it.

 

Hi,
this looks great and seem to be exactly what I am looking for with our architectural visualizations. But before I buy I am a bit concerned with lights not being shadowed by walls. I don´t want obejcts behind walls to be lit by my arealights and I understand this is the case right?
Will there be support for shadows any time soon? Otherwise could there be some sort of "limiting box" for instance a room volume? Otherwise I could always have the lights be triggered on/off as I enter or leave a room but it´s kind of a hassle...

 

Guys, I'm sorry for not replying earlier. In the last days we have moved to a new office location and were busy carying computers, furniture, beer crates and all sorts of other stuff.

Now we're online again!

@morimoto: Sounds weird. As I already replied to other users before, can you please upload an example project with your camera setup so we can reproduce you problem?

Thanks!

@HeeMan: You are right, there is no support for shadows. However, the range of the lights can be controlled by the respective Max Distance parameter. Nevertheless, switching on/off your lights depending on what room you are in is a good idea, since it will save a lot of gpu cycles, the less lights you are rendering.

 

Since we have moved to a new location, we would like to share some new footage. Fabian our 3D artist has been testing our lights and created a very nice looking architectural visualization.

There is only one directional light source for the sun, the rest of the lighting is completey done with our redLights. No ambient, spots or points.

Enjoy, we hope you like it.

 

I have an issue with demo scenes in the package.

There is brand new clean project with all Unity pro imported assets + Red Light pack.
When I build standalone Windows x86_64 game with all default preferences the built game with this package does always crash. Scene "apartment" from your demo.

If I build standalone Windows x86 the game is working normally.

Version: Unity pro 4.3.2f1
Platform: Windows 7 64 Bit
Memory: 16gb
Graphic card both: Nvidia Geforce GTX 670MX, IntelHD Graphics 400

I don't know what is the issue Unity or the package, but if I build game without package built "game" runs properly.

Sorry for long post. Don't know how to attach crash report.

Here is output log:

I hope it will help you to improve this amazing package.

 

Hi,

problem seems to be related to x86_64 deployment. Everything is working correctly for x86.

I'll look into it.

Martin

 

Hi I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about the ies lights, do they just convert ies data to cookies or are they more advanced than that?

 

Hi, we don't convert the ies data to cookies.

Instead we use the profiles to generate a lookup texture, that contains the candela values per angle between surface and light position. This value can be combined with one of the available falloff options (either constant, linear, quadratic, or a custom fall curve that can be defined via the built-in graph editor).

However, we only support ies profiles for point emitter, that have been exported by iesgen.
http://rip3d.net/Downloadmodels/iesgen_4.rar

This due to the fact, that there are quite a lot of different ies formats out there and iesgen outputs a "cleaned up" syntax, that is more suitable for parsing.

Hope this helps,

Martin

 

Is anybody using this with Shader Forge? I'm having a hard time seeing any lighting at all on objects using even basic Shader Forge shaders.

 

Hi,

I didn't test it with Shader Forge, since I haven't got copy at hand. But I'm assuming, that SF makes use of custom rendertype tags inside its shaders. Setting up our lights with custom shaders is a bit tricks but certainly possible. There is a section in the documentation as well as an example material, that is included in the package.

If you need more assistance, please send me a PM and I'll walk you through it.

Cheers,
Martin

 

Thanks for the reply. I read through the docs again-- turns out, our custom Shader Forge shaders had non-standard names for the Diffuse and Bump channels.

I didn't have to go into the code at all. Working now.

 

Uh... well, another question, here...

Is there anyway to change the buffer resolutions?

Even using just one area light in a scene at full resolution hammers our GPU usage, spiking it anywhere from 34-54% of the render time.

We get more acceptable performance when we are able to reduce our render view to quarter resolution. I'd like to be able to see what SSAL looks like when just its render buffer is reduced in resolution.

Thanks.

 

Is this compatible with Skyshop and Alloy?

 

FYI, This doesn't work with Skyshop 1.07 when using box projection. The area lights aren't rendered to cubemaps.

 

Hi redPlant guys,

First of all, this is an excellent asset, the demo scenes look amazing and the whole system is incredibly easy to use.

However, we have tripped up fairly early on and are having problems. We've pretty much tried everything short of going in and changing the script and shader code but to no avail. The problem we're getting is the specular maps on our textures is being completely ignored. We're using the standard Unity shader Bumped Specular, which lifts the specular map from the alpha channel from the main texture. This works fine when using Unity's point lights, but unfortunately the area light system seems to completely ignore it making the textures look pretty bland. Please see examples below.

Using Unity's point lights


Using redLight's area lights


As you can see, the spec map is being ignored for the area lights and results in making the texture look incredibly bland.

Hopefully, you can point out something obvious that we've missed that'll get it working. We really want to use area lights, but we don't have a whole lot of time to try and get it working (we're exhibiting a tech demo next week).

Thanks!

 

I purchased your product the other day and just now got around to putting it in. I'm trying to use it with a 3rd person character controller ("Character System" by Robin Schmidt). Reading the previous posts I see reference to upside down or other odd lighting, and that's exactly what's happening to me. Doesn't matter if I choose forward or deferred, DX11 or not, I get the same results - the light generated by the area light object is upside down and/or skewed and the position of the upside down image varies as I move the character controller, so obviously the error is tied to the character's camera. I'll post an image. The scene is a dimly lit simple 4-wall room with minimal ambient light and a single-color area light. I do note that if I change the controller to an FPS type everything works fine, so the error is tied to camera activity in 3rd person mode.

 

uh....hello... anyone out there? is this mic on? I see there's been no help for issues since May... Is this product still being supported? With other Unity products I'll usually see a fairly quick turnaround on questions. Nothing going on in here since May...

 

FYI, I had a Q answered from them via FB a week or so ago - i've nudged them about this thread.

 

Hi guys and thanks for the heads up @yezzer,

I don't know why, but I simply don't receive any more forum notifications at all. Anyone else having this problem?

Anyway, I'll answer your questions asap.

Cheers,
Martin

 

@Sinaz20:

This was answered via email. I'm posting my reply for the sake of completeness:

Right now there are no options for rendering with reduced buffer size.

You can try to adjust the buffer size manually. Find the ResetBuffer function in the AreaLightRenderer class and experiment with different buffer sizes:

m_albedoBuffer = new RenderTexture(width, height, 24, RenderTextureFormat.ARGB32, bufferReadWrite);
m_transparencyBuffer = new RenderTexture(width, height, 24, RenderTextureFormat.ARGB32, bufferReadWrite);
// enforce linear color space for normals
m_normalBuffer = new RenderTexture(width, height, 24, RenderTextureFormat.ARGB32, RenderTextureReadWrite.Linear);

I wouldn't recommend reducing the normal buffer as this will probably introduce visual artifacts, smaller sizes for albedo and transparency might work.

However, this is just a guess and not officially supported right now.

 

@yezzer:

Also posting for the sake of completeness:

Hi, it should work with Skyshop. We did a couple of tests a while ago and it worked together with he Skyshop shaders. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/released-screen-space-area-lights-ssal.175467/page-7

http://postimg.org/image/3qscgctgj/

However, integration with the Alloy package is still work in progress and currently not supported. Hope this helps!

 

@yezzer:

We are in contact with the developers of the Alloy package and together we hope to be able to integrate both packages properly. Unfortunately there isn't much more I can say right now.

 

@Jargon:

Right now we don't support spec/gloss maps. So the Alpha channel of the main diffuse texture is indeed ignored when using the stock BumpedSpecular shader.
In the current version we only take into account the shininess value of a material. However, we will address this in the next release.

 

@WayneS56:

I send you a patch via PM. If it solves your problem, it will be integrated into the next release.

Cheers,
Martin